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ARM's new CEO: You'll get no 'glorious new strategy' from me

Past performance no guarantee of future success, though

ARM Holdings is the kind of quiet success story Britain excels at, and really the sort of thing the data-fiddlers of Silicon Roundabout should aspire to be doing.

ARM doesn’t wrangle data and pass it off as a business model. It designs patentable processor technology that has turned US, Japanese and South Korean electronics giants into willing customers - including Cisco, Texas Instruments, Nintendo, Apple and – more recently - Microsoft.

Spun out of BBC Micro shop Acorn in 1990 with a single RISC processor, ARM quickly proved its viability: the company went public eight years later, breaking $213m in revenue soon after. It has expanded fourfold to turn over nearly $1bn today as consumer electronics companies, PC makers, network equipment manufacturers and semiconductor firms around the world have licensed chip architectures perfect for embedded systems with their small size, cool running and low power suck.

ARM confounded analysts during its fourth quarter growing sales by 19 per cent while chip giant Intel saw revenues down 3 per cent compared to a year ago.

Almost every smartphone on the planet contains a chip running an ARM-authored chip. Intel, which – unlike ARM – makes its own processors, remains overwhelmingly saddled with a PC-centric business going through a slump.

Now, ARM’s eyeing up mobile computing – the plan is for more than half of all tablets, mini-notebooks and other mobile PCs sold in 2015 to use ARM. Servers, too, are another possibility, with systems coming from Hewlett-Packard and Samsung. Canonical's already tuning its Ubuntu Linux to run on ARM servers.

The sun sets on East

All this happened under chief executive Warren East, CEO since 2001, and which is probably the reason why shares in ARM fell 3.3 per cent to 890 pence when East announced his surprise retirement on Tuesday.

Historians debate the importance of the individual over historic forces, but it seems as far as The Street’s concerned, there’s no debate and one man is responsible for ARM’s success - which is why they are afraid.

Step up East’s replacement: CEO Simon Segars, who has tried to reassure us there won’t be a radical change under his reign. Segars has even gone as far to claim his ideas are actually already being rolled out in the company’s roadmap. Segars, who is ARM's president, joined the firm three years before East. He was formerly the executive vice president of engineering, during which time he worked on the early ARM processors, as well as EVP of worldwide sales and EVP of business development. He held top spots at ARM in both the UK and US.

“I don’t see that the fundamentals of this business will change,” Segars told The Reg during a conference call with press on the day East announced his departure.

“I’ve been involved in development strategy over the years working with Warren, and I don’t see any reason to change. That said, the semiconductor industry is in state of change, so if we need to change tack a bit we will, but that’s how we’ve run this biz - morphing the business to respond.

“You should not expect I will be on a conference call any time saying this is the glorious new strategy for ARM because this is the right thing for us to be doing.”

That may or may not be a good thing. East has justified his sudden and unexpected decision to leave ARM at its highest point as good thing for ARM. Aged 54, he reckons it would have been bad for him to stay into the next round of product planning - he claims development cycles take six years and Segars is seven years his junior. “At ARM we are planning for the things that drive growth in 2020 and beyond. I’ve have been CEO for 20 years and I think that’s too long. It’s not healthy for the business to have somebody leading it for that time,” East said.

Given Segars' age, and using East’s reasoning, this would suggest we should expect another new ARM CEO around 2020.

You can believe what East said if you chose, and we have no alternative but to do so. Certainly it’s an ordered transition. East doesn’t leave for another four months; compare that to Intel’s hunt for a Paul Otellini replacement that’s four months old and still ongoing. Or to the sudden and chaotic departure of Microsoft’s Windows chief Steven Sinofsky in the middle of a major product launch.